The devil continued, **My people were once plentiful in our ocean home. The waters slowly sank over millennia and left us stranded in what you call the blue hole. But we could live well there at first. There was food, and there were tunnels where we could spawn our young. We gave ourselves to the most gifted among us, as is our way; no overpopulation and more knowledge consolidated in our wisers. Each of us who is eaten by another passes on its accumulated wisdom to its devourer. Until finally only I, the most canny of our kind, was left. I have lived more than seven hundred orbits of that
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